Philips Hue will get a sleeker new app rebuilt ‘from the ground up’

The Philips Hue app is getting an enormous replace on Thursday. The workforce at Signify, which makes Hue lights, has rebuilt the app “from the ground up” to make it simpler to make use of. The new model appears principally the identical as the prevailing app, however it has tweaks across the edges to make it faster to entry completely different controls.

One of the larger modifications is quicker entry to room controls. Now, if you faucet on a room or zone, the app will current a grid of all of the accessible lights and pre-set scenes so you’ll find them immediately. In the prior model, you needed to swap backwards and forwards throughout completely different tabs that have been straightforward to get misplaced in.

You’ll additionally now be capable to add new lights from inside the Room tab — not simply the Settings menu — and if you happen to’re an influence consumer with a number of Hue bridges, the app will allow you to swap between them from a button on the primary display.

Signify is changing the “routines” characteristic with a brand new “automations” tab, which is meant to supply extra superior choices for triggering your lights on and off. The app may also now take into accounts whether or not one other particular person is already house when triggering “coming home” or “leaving home” automations, so the lights gained’t all flip off simply because the Hue app’s controller stepped out of the home.

The new app launches Thursday for iOS and Android. Signify says that later this summer time, it’ll observe up with an replace introducing “dynamic scenes” that enable lights to cycle by means of completely different colours over time.